Yeah, I’m a little bit of a Harry Potter fan.

I’ve read the books three times now and I loved them this most recent time just as much as the first two. Even knowing what was going to happen, I loved going through and realizing connections I hadn’t before. I loved watching the love stories within from the beginning.

The last movie made me cry–a lot. I loved it. Everyone complains about how young the first few books and movies are, but I love that they bring me back to my childhood. I love remembering how my mom, brother, and I would take turns reading aloud to each other every night. I loved laying on the long bench of our kitchen table listening.

I am not, on the other hand, a Harry Potter fanatic. I didn’t dress up for the movie premier. I do toy with the idea of dressing up as characters for Halloween one day, but that’s as far as I’ll go there. I do not play quidditch at the park nor own a wand. I did have a secret desire to own a Gryffindor scarf, so in the process of developing my new knitting skills, I decided to make one.

I didn’t really follow any instructions, but rather combined ideas from multiple places and just went with it. This article was particularly helpful, as was the book Charmed Knits. In the end, I wanted a scarf that suited my personal needs, so I picked a yarn that felt good to me, made it the size I wanted, and just kind of went with the flow. Here’s what I turned out with:

I am thoroughly happy with the end result.

Peanut modeling it for me while blowing her whistle.

It’s huge. 10 inches wide and, including the fringe, 7.5 feet long. I wanted a scarf that was big and poofy and warm that entirely covered my neck and didn’t itch. I ended up buying 80% wool 20% acrylic yard. I attempted to switch colors every 6 inches by matching up one rectangle to the next, but I must have ended up going a little bigger with each one (though not noticeably) because the scarf ended up being around a foot longer than I was planning. I wanted it to be about my height before fringe, which is 5’5.

It was a time consuming, but easy project. All of it is in garter stitch (which means you knit front and back), so it got me really confident on my knitting before starting to purl on my next project (I’ll post it soon). I’m still having trouble getting edges how I’d like them, but I’m getting better. Switching colors was surprisingly easy, but where it switches the ends were particularly un-pretty. Sewing those in at the end helped, but didn’t entirely solve the problem.

I knitted on the bus, as breaks for homework, during class when I wasn’t taking notes (doing something with my hands actually helps me to concentrate better), at home while Peanut played. Everywhere and anywhere. Lots of people were interested in what I was doing and many of my classmates congratulated me on finishing when I wore my scarf to school for the first time last week (though I actually finished it about a week earlier and it was too warm to wear to school). I feel so awesome that I took some balls of yarn and created something I really wanted. With buying the yarn (two skeins of each color with plenty left over) and the needles, which are obviously reusable, the whole project cost me less than $20. Definitely less than I would have paid for a Gryffindor scarf that wouldn’t have been nearly as awesome as this one.